What (And Where) Are The Classic Free Games?

An anonymous reader asks: "I'm flying from the US to Europe in a few weeks and am taking my iBook along for the ride. With a seven hour flight looming, I'm wanting to take some games along to play. But I don't want to download a bunch of freeware that may or may not be junk; I just want the classics. What are the classic free games? I've already downloaded Nethack and am looking into Freeciv. What else is there? I need something that's multiplatform (or at least has a Mac port), something that's stable and has stood the test of time, and something that is more complex and engrossing than a Tetris clone. Thanks!"

MAME?

[randomErr]

Why not install MAME and borrow [slashdot.org] some roms?

The classics are everywhere.

Emulation!

[NeoOokami]

Although free, in the gray area.. emulators and roms gives you access to thousands of wonderful games. You can find many good NES, GB, Genesis, SNES, and Arcade emus for both MacOS 9 and X. I would personally reccomend RockNES, Snes9x (MacOS X version really shaping up lately with gamepad support), gnuboy (simple but quite powerful and compatible), Generator, and MacMAME (Same as Snes9x).

Fits the bill

[drodver]

Master of Orion II!

Hah! How interesting...

[zerocool^]

My roommates and I, in the end-of-summer boredom lurch, just set up a computer running MS-DOS 6.22 just to play the old games! Man, back in the day...
Anyway, I'm only 21, so I never did much with dos, so despite what I think I know about "computers" and windows or other microsoft products, etc, I know exactly crap about EMS and XMS and EMM386 and HIMEM and SMARTDRV. We've run into problems with wing commander running at the speed of light because it counts clock cycles, not seconds, and with some games not liking the fact that the machine has 160 megs of ram. One of the games suggested we make $ExtraRam sized cache with smartdrv so the game thought we had less memory, except instead of $ExtraRam being 5,341 KB, it was 157,325,210 KB...
But anyway, here's my list of games I have installed:

Doom 2
Mechwarrior 2
Wing Commander
Wing Commander II
Wing Commander III
Privateer
Jazz Jackrabbit
Rise of the Triad
Duke Nukem I
Duke Nukem II
Duke Nukem 3D
Warcraft I
Command and Conquer
Command and Conquer: Red Alert

I don't know how many of these have mac ports - Doom2 did, I use to own it...

I also didn't know that windows 3.1 wasn't an operating system. That bugged me - when you install windows, it doesn't install any OS files, just the interface to dos... Despite saying "Windows Operating System" on the floppies.

~Will

Re:Speaking of this...

[Reality Master 101]

they elected instead to remove them all (well, almost, Robby Roto (I think) and two other 'legal' ROMs are still available) thinking that since they were contacted by one, likely they'd be contacted by more.

Sorry, but that's just stupid. Most of the manufacturers knowingly did NOT take legal action. They could have just taken down the couple that were in question, and moved on. If they got a flood of legal activity, they could have delt with it then.

The second reason, I suspect, is because of the massive bandwidth requirements to serve all those ROMs. They operated almost soley on donations. I contributed what I could, when I could.

Now that's a reason I could have respected. If they didn't have the money to support it, then just say so, but don't give us a cock-and-bull story about "one mfg complained, therefore we have to take the WHOLE DAMN THING DOWN" which just doesn't ring true.

Can you say the same?

As a matter of fact I did, so take your take your nose in the air elsewhere.

Re:I dunno if it's ported to the Mac, but..

[Hydro-X]

Been there, done that. The stewardesses didnt really pay attention to what I was doing, but I got a few odd looks from the people behind and next to me. :]

Betrayal at Krondor

[plaurila]

It came out in 1994, was later released by Sierra as freeware, and is still one of the best CRPG experiences I've had.